“Surprise?” Mom offered me a pained look over her shoulder. Seeing my trauma face, she stopped shoveling eggs onto a plate to pour me that cup of coffee. “She’s getting older and could use the help. The house is huge. And it’s only one town over. You have the car, so you can still see your friends. You’ll have to switch schools, but this makes a lot of sense for us, Sara. Financially, family-wise. I told the landlord last night we won’t be re-upping the lease.”

I blinked at her incredulously. I loved my grandma—love her—but my mother also affectionately calls her the Geriatric Battleax for a reason. She took no crap, and when it came to throwing shoes, her aim was Olympian. It was also her preferred method of correcting people; I needed extra hands to count how many times my butt had suffered one of Mormor’s turbo-launched tennis shoes.

“She’s going to drive you nuts. Us nuts,” I insisted.

“Yep, you’re right, but we’ll figure it out. No rent means a lot of extra income, and someone I know is going to college in a couple years.” Mom slid the plate in front of me. I hoped she attributed the gassy expression on my face to her news and not the hangover. She hadn’t said much about the party or the previous night, probably because she was sitting on her ticking bomb of an announcement.

“You’re serious,” I said. “I’m going to Stonington next year?”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.” She sat across from me and watched me not so much eat the eggs and toast as push them around and make interesting shapes with them. “I wanted to settle it before the end of the school year, so you could say your goodbyes and get contact info and stuff. Mormor’s excited, thinks it’ll be good for us.”

“Mormor also thinks Tang is delicious. She’s wrong a lot.”

“Serendipity.” Mom reached out to squeeze my hand. “I know it sucks, but Stonington has a great school. Better accredited than your current one. More AP classes, more languages to choose from than just Spanish and French. It’s not all bad, I promise.”

I wanted to argue that it was a heaping helping of bad, but I understood why she’d made the decision, even if I didn’t like it. Mom struggled to support the household with her nine-to-five office job. She borrowed money from Mormor a lot to make sure she didn’t bounce checks or make late payments. I did want to go to college, and I’d get some scholarships with my grades, but Mom made just enough money that I’d fall into the uncomfortable bracket of “not poor, but definitely not middle class, either,” so financial aid was sketchy at best.